Just finished Henrika Tandefelt, Konsten att härska: Gustaf III inför sina undersåtar; a bit like Peter Burke’s The Fabrication of Louis XIV, it is a study of the use of rhetoric in political life. Good read. I like to, sometimes, read stuff outside the field I am working in. (Based on a PhD dissertation at Helsinki university, which is available online. For those who don’t read Swedish, there are pictures in an appendix (pdf).)
My to read list:
Robert Proctor & Londa Schiebinger eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance.
Clearing up my backlog of TLS.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare.
Plus lots of papers and book chapters connected to what I am writing at the moment. Of course.
Technorati Tags: agnotology, Gustaf III, Henrika Tandefelt, Londa Schiebinger, Louis XIV, Robert Proctor, Stephen Greenblatt, TLS
Searching for water on Mars is a classic in the history of science, and now it seems that Phoenix, NASA:s most recent craft that landed there some three weeks ago, has found ice on the red planet. The news was broadcast on Twitter. [via Anna Toss.]
Background information and pictures of the ice here.
Yes, Twitter. Yet another way of making people interact with science and technology. Today, 22 800 follow Phoenix on Twitter.
Most twitterers use the service to send up-to-the-second news about the minutiae of their lives to friends, but Rhea Borja, a member of Ms. McGregor’s team, sees it as a way to spread NASA news to twentysomethings. “To reach a new generation of folks,” said Ms. Borja, a thirtysomething.
In the past few years, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s media team has adopted many Web 2.0 technologies, producing podcasts, posting videos on YouTube, blogging and setting up a Facebook page
writes NYT.
Securing an extrascientific fanbase for space exploration is not only about big popular science media à la Carl Sagan anymore …
Technorati Tags: NASA, Phoenix, social media, Twitter
Watching tens of thousands of documents disappear before your eyes while you’re in the process of using them … Yes, that is what happened to me.
My next paper is part of a pet project I’ve been working on on and off for years, now; it explores distributed computing from various angles: open innovation, scientific practice, the public engagement with science and so on.
One of the distributed computing projects I am studying used a forum for communication, a very active one where both the scientists running the project and the participants posted for years. It contained lots and lots of posts, a very good source for writing the (recent) history of one of the major distributed computing projects.
Then it just disappeared. It seems there was a software glitch, a problem with the database of some kind; lack of backups made it impossible to restore it. The forum was not run by the scientists but by hobbyists connected with the project.
I’ve written to people running the forum, but it seems to be a rather farfetched hope that it will ever be published again.
Fortunately, I had saved a number of documents of importance to the kinds of questions I am working with locally, on my harddrive.
Tip: there are software that helps with downloading sites; for the Mac, Sitesucker.
Technorati Tags: archives, distributed computing
I voted, yesterday, in the HSS election. This year, for the first time, votes in the election are cast electronically; you log in at the site and vote. Simple and efficient. According to a mail from HSS, received when I started the computer this morning, a record number of persons have apparently voted.
(However, other parts of the HSS web seems to be down at the moment; hope it won’t impede voting.)
Technorati Tags: history of science society
Time to get this blog going, again; I’ve been blogging in Swedish only for quite some time, but now it is time, methinks, to brush of this little corner of cyberspace (what a wonderful 90´s feel there is to that word, innit?).
